"I just can't figure out how to do it without losing contact with my friends."
easy . . . call them, visit them, email them, write letters to them. you don't need an application to managed personal relationships.
easy . . . call them, visit them, email them, write letters to them. you don't need an application to managed personal relationships.
AFAICT there are only two ways to provide that basic feature:
(!) A centralized service like Facebook that manages the identity network. Any centralized organization is most likely ultimately going to exploit the fact that they own the network for their own gain, financial or otherwise.
or
(2) A decentralized service based on the similar cryptographic math as bitcoin, where every user gets one token representing their identity, and some sort of way to propagate changes to their identity signed by that token to everyone they are connected to and this needs to be accomplished in such a way that you can always re-establish the links to your friends in the network to be able to sync data.
I can't even begin to imagine how you'd develop the latter into a form that would be usable and therefore adoptable by the average person.
- tried-and-tested public key cryptography techniques
- using e-mail as a buffered delivery mechanism (everyone has an e-mail account that can store plenty of messages until they're next on-line)
- borrowing the typical DVCS copy-the-whole-repo approach so you've got distributed back-ups
- writing a native client for whichever platforms you wanted to support.
If someone wants to make money off it, come up with a neat physical way to connect something personal but memorable to keys of sufficient complexity to encrypt everything robustly: mobile app, USB device, whatever.
The only obvious limitation is physical bandwidth and storage capacity, which would make copy-the-whole-repo unsustainable if people kept sharing lots of photos/multimedia content but their friends don't want to "download" all of it. How much this will matter as data storage and communication network capacity increases is anyone's guess.
In the meantime, if you were willing to accept a delay you could have a request/reply system to fetch larger items, or someone could charge a modest sum of real money to people who want to use an actual centralised escrow-like system that is always available to their friends even when they're not on-line. The system doesn't need to be able to see into any content, just to act as a more real-time substitute for the default buffered transmission via e-mail.
PS it will be completely F/OSS, most likely GPL depending on contributor consensus.
But yeah, you've hit the nail right on the head. Obviously, my will fall into your (2) category, so we've got some major usability and cryptographic hurdles to tackle. But please rest assured that the solutions exist and that I've got most of them hammered out in my mind - the rest just require a little brainstorming and puzzle solving.
PS it will be completely F/OSS, most likely GPL depending on contributor consensus.
The rest is overthink.
With #2 you'd still need trusted sources that can verify that a person i found via johndoe@acme.com or +1 (914) 555-1212 is in fact the owner of that email or phone number.
You do when you're keeping in touch with friends you've made throughout your life and not just your current ones. That's the thing Facebook makes easy.
Also email and writing letters don't really work. If I sent a letter to a friend I seriously doubt they would bother responding, and most people I know personally don't use email. They use Facebook. That's the big problem - Facebook has replaced email for a lot of people making it one of the only ways (besides visiting/calling) to contact them.
Your friends are the current ones. Those other people aren't friends anymore, they're acquaintances, people you used to know but don't see anymore. Friend isn't a permanent status, it's the people you hang out with and see on a regular basis. If your only contact with a person is through facebook, they aren't your friends.
Your definition of friendship is outrageously shallow and is contrary to any other definition I have heard.
He was right, nothing is different. It's like friends back in the 1800s exchanging letters. Doesn't mean that our friendship is less because we don't go out on Fridays and pound down a few pints.
In contrast, the people I work with, I spend far more time with, and interact directly with more frequently than my friend. Yet I wouldn't consider any of them friends.
Ditto, where did I say seeing someone every day made them a friend? If it's this "it's the people you hang out with and see on a regular basis" that wasn't meant to qualify everyone you see daily as a friend.
> There is also a very small group of people that I see maybe once or twice a year that I would consider friends.
But you see them, which is my point. If your only contact with them is on Facebook, and losing Facebook would end your contact with them; they aren't your friends.
> Your definition of friendship is outrageously shallow and is contrary to any other definition I have heard.
I don't think you've understand what I'm saying well enough to say what my definition is since you've gotten it so clearly wrong.
>Friend isn't a permanent status, it's the people you hang out with and see on a regular basis.
In my post where I say "maybe once or twice a year" I am saying precisely that I do NOT see them on a regular basis.
It is not that I don't understand what you're saying, it is that you're not saying what you mean correctly.
It's you that's devalued the word IMHO, if you are codifying a 'friend' relationship with everyone you've ever met.
Replace the "friends" in his original post with "acquaintances," and his point stands.
Facebook is useful as a long term rolodex.
That's changing the argument, those words mean totally different things. My point is, Facebook makes keeping in touch with acquaintances easy, but isn't necessary to keep in touch with actual friends. Friends are people you see outside of Facebook.
Ask any of those less introverted people to name someone who's an acquaintance but not a friend, I bet they come up with a name showing that when pressed, they can make the distinction and do have different meanings for those words.
I do not believe there are people who cannot make that distinction.
Sure, you're concerned he was using "friends" too loosely. I'm saying you should give him a pass. It's of course up to you.
"Hey, what's your new address?"
"I emailed it to you, go search through your messages"
vs
"Check my Facebook profile"
Some improvements and it would IMHO be as easy, if not easier, as opening Facebook, trying to find a contact and fight against the timeline to find the information you are looking for.
I think the party part is a bit of personal choice. If I run a party I want to notify $foo people. And $foo is always a smaller number than my Facebook "friends". I just prefer the ability to select people and only tell them what I want to say without creating tons of groups for everything.
The thing that Facebook does well - is tracking down contacts - to add to your 'address book.' It's not so easy in the world of email. That's because we aren't publishing our address books publicly (probably for good reason.)
Facebook can be a great tool for sharing photos and other things with your friends. But most of what is actually happening on Facebook is voyeurism -- you get to stalk people whom you sort of know.